shopper experience Archives | Lateshipment.com

Pre-Parcel Anxiety And The Problems It Brings To Your E-Commerce Business

Sashank Ravindranath — Wed, 26 Jun 2024 06:55:13 +0000

We’re all worried about things at times. How is this day going to turn out? How is my business going to thrive with the rising competition? Will the Chiefs win this year’s Super Bowl? What is going to be my costume for Halloween? Or Where is my order?

Now each of these questions has a reason to exist. The last question — that’s because of this relatively new condition called pre-parcel anxiety that is affecting several online shoppers today.

What is Pre-Parcel Anxiety?

The concept of ‘pre-parcel anxiety’ comes with the understanding of the ‘post-purchase’ phase.

To bring this into more context, let’s picture this scenario: We’ve all placed orders in online stores, right?

That means we’ve all wondered where our orders were at some point. So, this anxiety is normal or that’s what we think. But pre-parcel anxiety isn’t that. It’s what happens later — when customers cannot determine the status of their orders with the business they shopped with.

When such things happen and customers are left in the dark regarding their orders, they tend to get anxious, assuming the worst, leading to increased support inquiries or WISMO requests.

Pre-parcel anxiety is the psychological condition a customer undergoes while awaiting their parcels that they have no direction about. It keeps customers impatient about their orders, often checking the carrier’s tracking page and bombarding the brand’s support teams with WISMO calls.

While frequent order status inquiries mean anxiety for the customer, they mean something entirely different for the merchant.

The Effects of Pre-Parcel Anxiety on Your E-Commerce Business

Let’s take a look back — pre-parcel anxiety is a feeling of unease and impatience while waiting for an online order to arrive, and can be a significant hurdle for e-commerce businesses.

As we mentioned earlier, the first sign of frustration from pre-parcel anxiety is increased support inquiries.

Repeated inquiries like WISMO can be frustrating for both customers and support staff. For instance, customers waiting anxiously for their orders are prone to leave negative reviews and complaints on social media, leading to a decreased brand reputation.

On the other hand, customers experiencing pre-parcel anxiety are more likely to contact your support team with questions about their order status. This can strain your resources and lead to longer wait times for genuine inquiries.

Support tickets with a longer resolution time can cause customer frustration and negative experiences. Ultimately, customers who have a negative experience with waiting for a previous order may be less likely to purchase from your store again.

TLDR: Here’s how pre-parcel anxiety affects your business:

Increased support inquiries
Lower brand reputation
Reduced customer satisfaction
Lost opportunities to drive repeat purchases

Fortunately, there are steps you can take to address pre-parcel anxiety and improve the customer experience you offer.

How E-Commerce Businesses Can Mitigate Pre-Parcel Anxiety And Its Impact

1. Transparency in communication

First and foremost, letting your customers know that their orders are in safe hands is a great start in your attempt to mitigate their anxiety. There are multiple actions that you can take to achieve that.

For starters, you can provide clear and accurate information about estimated delivery times on product pages and during checkout to make sure that your customers don’t feel the urgency to contact your support team with the need to get tracking information.

You can then double it down by offering real-time tracking information with detailed and regular updates to keep your customers in the loop of their orders.

P.S. You don’t have to wait for customers to hit your support reps with WISMO calls, instead, you can send proactive email or SMS notifications about their delivery status.

2. Setting Realistic Expectations

Second and most importantly, don’t over-promise on delivery times.

Be realistic about timeframes, especially during peak seasons. I.e. Delivery during peak season times like the holidays can take longer than usual, in such cases you can let the customers know about these updated delivery timelines and reasons for delays.

Setting delivery expectations right by showing order arrival dates on your website like product, cart, and checkout pages helps you improve conversions, reduce cart abandonment, and ultimately works towards building trust and boosting conversions.

Of course, you can always put these steps into action on your own but your shipping partner might not be straightforward with delays, given to not project themselves in a bad light.

On the other hand, implementing these steps is relatively simple — when you have an efficient package tracking system in place that works on your behalf.

How a last-mile tracking solution like lateshipment.com can help

LateShipment.com’s Delivery Experience Management (DEM) is the perfect solution for you to craft order tracking experiences that boost engagement and repeat purchases — all while reducing customer service costs.

DEM can help you reduce WISMO calls by 72% by sending delivery status updates in the form of:

Automated shipping notifications proactively sent on channels like email, SMS or WhatsApp based on triggers for every step of the package journey from order ‘shipped’ to ‘delivered’ to ‘delayed’ and
Self-serve order lookup that enables customers to track their orders without any help, embed an order lookup widget on your website or chat.

Like Jane Norman of Nola Skinsentials says, “Many brands think their relationship stops after shipping the package, which is not true”. Thus, the need to make the post-purchase phase customer-friendly is a must if you plan to stay ahead of the curve.

By addressing detractors like pre-parcel anxiety, you can create a smoother and more positive post-purchase CX that leads to increased customer satisfaction, improved brand loyalty, and ultimately, higher sales for your e-commerce business.

Also, while you’re there, try LateShipment.com for not just seamless delivery experiences but all your post-purchase needs. Curious about how we might work for your business? Talk to us.

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How To Automate E-Commerce Customer Service

Sashank Ravindranath — Wed, 01 May 2024 14:08:44 +0000

Customer service is an important aspect of running a successful business. Whether you are selling products through your e-commerce website or a marketplace, effective customer service that is 24*7 is beneficial can be beneficial to boost sales and acquire loyal customers.

96% of customers admitted that customer service is an important factor in determining their loyalty towards a brand.

For starters, leveraging automation in customer service helps you solve your customers’ queries without any involvement of support agents. It also creates opportunities for you to deliver personalized shopping experiences.

In this post, we will explore the best ways to automate e-commerce customer service and delight your customers.

But first,

What is E-commerce Customer Service Automation?

E-commerce customer service automation is the process of integrating customer service with technology to streamline operations and provide quick and consistent responses to customer queries. The focus of automating customer service is to tend to customer requests as efficiently as possible without the need for human intervention or time consumption.

E-commerce customer service automation is a must if –

Your support team spends a lot of time working on repetitive support tasks
Your support inbox is always full of hundreds of requests and queries

Before we take a look at the different ways to bring in automation into your support processes, let us explore some of the benefits of leveraging this strategy for simplifying customer interactions.

Benefits of E-commerce Customer Service Automation

Automated customer service offers a multitude of benefits for e-commerce businesses because:

24*7 Availability – It offers 24*7 support to your customers irrespective of the time zone or location they are situated at. You can resolve customer queries even when your team is offline.
Increased Productivity – With automation, you can respond to more support tickets in less time. This speeds up the entire query resolution process, allowing your support agents more time to spend on priority tickets.
Real-time & Quick Responses – Automation lowers the ticket resolution time for your customers as you deliver quicker responses to their queries. It also reduces the amount of human errors in the responses.
Reduced Costs & Overheads – It brings together multiple support channels under a centralized platform allowing you to switch between various channels with ease. You do not have to invest in multiple tools to manage customer queries. As automation takes over manual repetitive tasks, you do not need to hire and train additional support representatives to handle large volumes of customer queries.
Empowered Customers – This allows customers to utilize self-service solutions like a customer portal, knowledge base, chatbots, and more to find quick resolutions to their problems. They do not have to contact human agents or rely on them to get their doubts solved.

5 Ways to Automate E-commerce Customer Service

E-commerce customer service automation offers proactive support to customers with what they need without having to contact any human agent. Here are a few ways you can automate your e-commerce customer service.

1. Automated Ticketing Management

The next aspect of customer service that you can automate is streamlining the process of customer service ticket assignment. No support agent would be happy sorting through dozens of support tickets to find the ones that are relevant to their department.

By using an automated ticket management system, you can categorize customer queries based on the problem type or department and automatically assign them to the correct team. The system also checks for the number of open tickets, availability of support agents, and a host of other factors before assignment. This ensures that your support agents have a balanced queue of support tickets and enough time to resolve them successfully.

You can also configure auto-responders or triggers to send acknowledgment emails to customers that their request has been received by the concerned team and is being currently processed.

2. Chatbots

AI-powered chatbots have become an indispensable part of E-commerce websites these days. They help customers at every step of their shopping journey by addressing their queries around the clock. They can also handle large volumes of queries simultaneously which is impossible for human agents. From providing answers to basic questions to addressing complex queries, chatbots take your customer service to the next level by helping you forge stronger customer relationships.

Investing in AI-powered chatbots can automate your query resolution process and offer personalized assistance to customers as well. Based on the customer queries, the AI engine can detect the ones that might require human intervention and forward them to the relevant support department. It can seamlessly conduct this agent handover without disrupting the customer experience.

3. Centralized Inbox

The first effective automation you can utilize is to have a centralized inbox for managing all your customer queries. This includes incoming questions from various channels like live chats, email, social media, WhatsApp, and so on. A unified inbox gathers all these queries and presents them in a single platform for easy access and timely resolution.

As customers today look for seamless omnichannel support, it is advisable to consolidate their inquiries from various channels into a single dashboard. This enables quicker and more organized responses. Furthermore, a shared inbox will automatically alert your team about the new messages. This will ensure that no customer query goes unnoticed. Any customer queries, regardless of which channel they are received on, will have minimal response times.

Jason Mueller from a1autotransport.com states: “Having a central inbox can be handy for any type of business. As we deal with many types of car shipments coming in from a variety of different sources and emails, having it in one inbox makes customer support a breeze, and it leaves you better organized as well.”

4. Hands-free Responses

Most of the time, e-commerce customers have similar inquiries like order-related updates, returns process, refund status, and so on. Hence, instead of spending time crafting individual responses, you can automate this process by creating templates. You can import the template into your messages in just a few clicks and send responses to your customers in no time.

Templates are pre-written messages that are automatically sent to the customers as a response to their standard questions. You can personalize the messages by adding desired dynamic content fields, such as customer name, shipment tracking link, order ID, and so on.

5. Self-serve Customer Portal

Last but not least, you can set up a self-service portal that allows customers to discover solutions to their queries on their own. In fact, 70% of customers expect brand websites to include a self-service application.

A self-service portal like document360 provides customers with all the necessary information to resolve simple and repetitive issues themselves. This portal is usually connected to a knowledge base that offers the right information to customers thereby reducing the need to rely on a human support agent. This reduces the number of customer inquiries being sent to your support team.

For example, Amazon offers an intuitive self-service portal that allows customers to directly contact the team or figure out things on their own. Check out the screenshot below that allows customers to track their orders, receive assistance with respect to their Prime membership, manage their payment information, and more.

Wrapping Up

E-commerce customer service automation helps you deliver high-quality customer service at all times. It refines and streamlines customer interactions using various tools like AI-powered chatbots, self-service portals, messaging templates, and more. This reduces the workload on your support team and enables them to cater to other important tasks.

Customer service automation when done in the right manner can make every customer interaction a delightful experience. It will show your customers that you care and boost loyalty. Leverage automation to simplify your e-commerce customer service and amp up your overall customer experience.

This is a guest post by Kruti Shah

Kruti Shah is a content writer and marketer at The Marketing Drama. She loves to write about insights on current trends in Technology, Business, and Marketing. In her free time, she loves baking and watching Netflix. You can connect with her on Linkedin.

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How To Handle Returns And Exchanges During The Holidays

Sashank Ravindranath — Mon, 18 Dec 2023 06:52:27 +0000

With increased holiday sales comes an inevitable surge in returns and exchanges that could be a challenge post the shopping fiesta of BFCM and Christmas.

January is the peak month for package returns, with e-commerce businesses seeing 51% of the returns in a given year. However, the number of returns is generally high through December, January, and early February.

Fair warning: The problem is never returns but the challenges businesses face when they’re unequipped to deal with the sudden influx of returns be it due to falling prey to misconceptions or not having proper strategies to handle them effectively.

Businesses assume the post-purchase phase of a customer journey to end with shipping and delivery
Businesses assume returns are a cost-center that discourages customers from shopping with you again
Businesses often operate with limited resources, making it challenging to dedicate the time and effort required for effective returns strategies.

While this may seem daunting, a well-defined return policy and efficient processes can turn a potential headache into a positive customer experience and build customer loyalty.

Here’s a little something from our end to help e-commerce businesses like yours navigate the holiday returns rush effectively.

8 Tips To Handle Returns And Exchanges Like A Pro During The Holidays

1.Review your return policy and extend your return window

More often than not, holiday purchases are gifts for loved ones — hence, these packages might not get opened until after the holidays. Thus, during the holidays, you can consider offering a longer window (60-90 days) than your standard policy to accommodate holiday returns.

2. Clearly Communicate Your Policy

Make your return policy readily available throughout your website, especially on the product pages, order confirmations, and checkout areas. Make sure things are clear, concise, and easy to understand. For starters, you can include details about eligible items, timeframes, restocking fees, and instructions for initiating returns and exchanges in your policy.

3. Streamline the Return Process

Make the return process as simple and convenient as possible. Offer options for easy return initiation, printable return labels, multiple return locations, etc. Such actions help customers avoid long wait times and reduce frustrations.

4. Reduce Return-related Inquiries

Enable your customer service team to proactively handle return This helps in keeping customer interactions to a minimum during the order return phase. Similar to order deliveries, you can also send notifications about the return status to keep customers engaged. Ultimately, a good returns experience plays a decisive factor when it comes to their repeat shopping decision and thereby cements you as their preferred brand.

5. Enable Flexible Return Options

The holiday season can be unpredictable. Be prepared to adapt your return policies and processes as needed to address unforeseen circumstances or spikes in return volume. Ensure you have sufficient resources and personnel to handle increased inquiries and return requests. Additionally, you can allocate dedicated space for returned items and establish a system for inspecting and restocking them efficiently. This helps minimize delays and ensures your inventory remains accurate.

6. Track and Analyze Returns

Returns give you quality insights into your products and your customers’ shipping decisions. Leverage this goldmine by tracking your return data throughout the holiday season. Analyze common reasons for returns, identify problematic products, and assess the effectiveness of your return policies and procedures. Data can also give you insights into your returns process and help you refine your strategies and improve the return experience for future seasons.

7. Promote Exchanges over Refunds

70% of the returns are size and fit-related. Instead of shelling out dollars by refunding each return that comes in, you can provide the option to exchange the product or get store credits. You can also consider offering incentives such as discounts on exchange items, free shipping on exchanges, or store credit bonuses to encourage customers to pick exchanges and store credit. This strategy can help in retaining customers and minimizing revenue loss from returns.

8. Invest in Returns Automation

Leverage technology to streamline your return management process:

Utilize return portals that allow customers to initiate and track returns online
Automate return processing tasks, such as generating return labels, sending email notifications, and managing refunds.
Extend automation to manage inventory levels and restocking procedures.

Automating returns-related tasks saves time and resources by reducing workload and allows you to focus on other important tasks efficiently.

LateShipment.com’s Returns Experience Management is one such powerful, self-service returns platform built to boost the returns-related metrics that matter most to your business.

Here’s how it can come in handy.

How Returns Experience Management Can Help

Returns Experience Management comes with a user-friendly self-service returns portal where customers can easily initiate returns, choose a preferred method, track the status of the return, etc. This simplifies the whole returns process and improves repeat purchases.

You can also keep customers informed about the status of their returns at every step via email and SMS notifications with returns tracking information and updates to enhance the returns experience.

Returns Experience Management also comes with the provision to offer incentives and encourage customers to opt for exchanges and store credits instead of a full refund.

Additionally, with self-service and smart automations, you can drastically reduce the time spent per return request and inbound conversation volume. Also, with proactive status updates, live package tracking, and a host of support team-friendly features, you can free up your support agents to address more pressing issues.

The post How To Handle Returns And Exchanges During The Holidays appeared first on Lateshipment.com.

How To Exceed Your Customers’ Expectations For The Holiday Season

Sashank Ravindranath — Wed, 15 Nov 2023 08:15:47 +0000

Want to truly stand out in this competitive e-commerce landscape and enjoy the fruits of holiday season success?

Easy. Give your customers what they want.

What customers want

The increase in e-commerce-based technology, changes in the status quo of online shopping, ever-dynamic trends, etc have all turned customers’ wants into needs. Don’t forget, these interests keep on changing YoY.

Sure, you can do the bare minimum and just meet ends. But that doesn’t cut through today’s landscape.

You really need to understand your customers’ mindset, go the extra mile, and give more than what they want

To help you do that, we’ve tried to cover some of the most crucial things your customers expect from your brand and how you can exceed their expectations.

How To Exceed Your Customers' Expectations For The Holiday Season

Here are several strategies and tips that can help you not only meet but exceed customers’ expectations to ensure that your e-commerce business shines during the holiday season.

Let’s delve into these techniques and make this holiday season one to remember.

1. Store, marketing, and the holiday spirit

Let’s start with one of the early expectations for customers when choosing an e-commerce store to shop with during the holiday season — a trustworthy and interesting store.

Imagine ending up on a website or application for your particular holiday season needs and finding it outdated. It really makes one question the authenticity of the store and keeps it easy to move on to the next option.

So, what can you do to prevent this from happening to your business?

Populate your store’s website with a holiday-themed design that includes banners, icons, graphics, colors, and imagery
Consider incorporating interactive features such as holiday-themed quizzes, interactive product showcases, and other virtual experiences into your marketing campaigns to engage customers
Set up personalized email campaigns to prevent abandoned cart incidents. You can also take this up a notch and include holiday-special offers to motivate your customers even further
Offer branded tracking pages to improve convenience for the customer with seamless order tracking and brand recall

2. Gift guides, bundles, and special initiatives

Moving on to our next holiday-specific initiatives — 36% of holiday season orders are gifts for someone else. Here are some ideas for you to capitalize on this opportunity and maximize your selling capabilities.

Create gift guides tailored to different recipient types or occasions, such as “Gifts for Pet Lovers” or “Holiday Party Essentials.” Organize these guides on your website for easy access
Offer bundled product packages that combine related items at a discounted price
Provide optional holiday-themed gift-wrapping services during the checkout process to add an extra layer of convenience
Allow customers to add personalized notes and gift-giving options to make the unboxing experience exciting

3. Shipping, fulfillment, and timely deliveries

Thanks to the growth of e-commerce, apart from looking across products and choosing a brand to buy them, today’s customers also have high expectations when it comes to order deliveries.

Their need for timely and intact order deliveries is understandable and somewhat from their perspective, the bare minimum.

However, with shipping carriers straining capacity during each holiday season to deliver a huge volume of packages, tasks like getting orders out on time become an uphill task.

Optimize your order fulfillment process to reduce processing times. Consider using automated systems to streamline order handling
Offer multiple shipping options such as BOPIS and expedited shipping options for customers who need their purchases urgently
Collaborate with multiple shipping partners based on their pros and cons to ensure on-time delivery and minimize the risk of shipping delays
Consider free shipping (with certain conditions such as order value or for exclusive members) to spur shoppers to spend more

4. Communication, engagement, and positive CX

Not just during the holiday season, something to always keep in mind with your customers is to prevent unnecessary frustrations from bad shopping experiences.

The bad news is that there are a lot of instances that arise from high customer expectations that can result in these bad experiences.

The good news is that proper communication can help you mitigate customer frustrations and ensure a positive customer experience.

Clearly outline your holiday shipping and return policies on your website. Include information about shipping deadlines, costs, and return windows
Communicate your customer support hours during the holiday season. Provide multiple contact options such as live chat, email, and phone support
Proactively resolve order issues before your customers become aware of them in the first place
Offer real-time order tracking, delivery and return status updates so that customers can monitor the progress of their purchases

5. Feedback, gratitude, and a personalized touch

One of the best ways to exceed your customers’ expectations apart from your regular offerings is to connect with them on a personal level.

In the current e-commerce landscape, where almost all of your competitors offer the same products, it is the experiences that you offer that give you an advantage.

Encourage customers to leave feedback and reviews after their holiday purchases. Express your appreciation for their input and use their feedback to improve your services
Send personalized thank-you emails to customers after their holiday purchases. Express your gratitude for their support and include a heartfelt message. You can also consider including handwritten thank-you notes in packages to add a personal touch. These notes convey your appreciation and make customers feel valued
As a token of your gratitude, offer exclusive discounts or promotions to loyal customers. This not only shows appreciation but also incentivizes repeat business
Include personalized order recommendations based on customer history in your tracking pages and delivery notifications to improve cross-selling opportunities and covert order tracking into a separate revenue channel.

Final Word

By implementing these comprehensive strategies and tips, you can not only meet but exceed your customers’ expectations during the holiday season.

Remember that the holiday season offers an opportunity to create memorable experiences and foster lasting customer relationships that extend beyond the festive period.

Wishing you a joyful and successful holiday season filled with happy customers and thriving sales!

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8 Branding Storytelling ideas during the holiday season

Raksna Anand — Thu, 09 Nov 2023 06:54:19 +0000

Brand storytelling is a relatively less used term. E-commerce sales have been explosively growing. There’s a reason why people prefer to shop online. Correction, there’s not one reason, there are so many reasons. Starting with convenience, people can shop whenever they want, wherever they want, however they want, in any device they want. You know what I mean, right?

And second, there are so many coupon codes, discount codes, special offers online, and exclusive online products. Other reasons include reviews, people can meticulously read what others think about a particular product and make an informed decision. This way customers know what they can expect. There is a free returns option also. In a world full of amazing brands, how can your brand stand out? That’s through Brand storytelling.

Branding VS Storytelling

Brand storytelling is very different from branding. For starters, branding focuses on very materialistic things like color, theme, logo, aesthetics, and creates an image of how a particular brand should be perceived by a customer.

But brand storytelling is different. Brand storytelling is how you emotionally connect to a customer by being your authentic self and what purpose you serve for the customer. The main goal of brand storytelling is an excellent relationship marketing tool.

Why is Storytelling important during the holiday season?

This is one question which always arises from a customer. Why should I buy from you? As an e-commerce brand, what values do you stand by? What do you provide for me other than the product, is what the customer in 2023 wants to know? Brand storytelling plays an important role here. Brand storytelling makes you:

Establish emotional connection
Stand out from the crowd
Build trust and authority
Make them feel included in your community

8 Branding storytelling ideas during the holiday season

1. Website design

Your website or your social media may be the first thing that a customer sees which sets a definitive image in the customer’s mind. Make sure that you say something that truly defines what you are and what you stand for. Your website homepage or your website design doesn’t just have to be about what you represent. Even very minimalistic touches can be very influential on your customer. For example, take a look at the micro animation below which sets the holiday mood even with a very micro interaction. This contributes to one of the elements of storytelling – Attention-grabbing.

2. Streamline the checkout process

Streamlining the checkout process is one small gesture from an e-commerce brand that you show on your site that you really want to make your customers feel convenient. Especially during the holiday season when the customers are in a rush? This not only increases conversion rates but also establishes a good customer experience.

3. Be your authentic self

Brand Storytelling is establishing that your brand stands for something. Don’t force your brand to be something that it’s not. Stand for what it really means, even if it means something really small. Take Patagonia, even on Black Friday, they stood by their values and boycotted the huge sale of the year opportunity. They opposed mass consumption during the holidays and their brand advocates even grew fond of what this brand did.

4. Unified messaging in all channels

All the channels through which you communicate, be it social media, be it your website, be it your brand tracking page, be it your holiday packaging, be it your emails or SMS, be it your customer support representatives, set the tone right. All these touchpoints revert back to your emotional connection.This unified messaging not only creates consistency but also builds trust and credibility.

Your brand, when it has a unified strategy, represents one thing and one thing only – your brand’s value, which is conveyed more and more to the customer once they get to experience all your touchpoints.

5. Customer testimonial

Customer testimonials are the social proof of what your brand stands for. This assures customers that you deliver what you say, leads to more conversions, and increases trust.

6. Showcase your CSR value

If you’re doing something that’s good for the environment and the people around you and your customers, then you should definitely take the liberty of showing that off to your customers. Not to sound very salesy, but good deeds are not meant to be kept a secret.

7. Holiday Packaging

Holiday packaging is one exciting touch point that you can use to further establish an emotional connection. You can customize your packaging, opt for eco-friendly gift options, add gifting options, do personalization, allow customers to add personalized notes, make interactive QR codes. This can lead to a very exciting unboxing experience.

8. Branded tracking page

Brands often think that nothing much could be established on branded tracking pages. But we are here to say that it’s not the case. You can add a number of content to your branded tracking page. You can add videos saying what your brand does and how the product that is being shipped to the customer can be used. This promotes customer education also, which reduces the number of returns. Branded tracking page is a great way to interact with your customers post-purchase.

Bonus Tip: Build a memorable customer experience

Building a memorable customer experience ties several knots to the relationship that you already have with your customer.

40% of shoppers do not come back to you after a poor delivery experience.

So, in any part of the customer journey, be it pre-purchase or post-purchase, there cannot be any compromise in what you offer. If the customer is not satisfied with the experience, this creates a negative brand image which cuts all the ties that you’ve tried so hard to establish.

Final Word

We live in an economy where relationships hold the primary power. Establishing an emotional connection with your customers is very important as we state again and again and again. E-commerce is not just about convenience and variety of products anymore, it’s more than that. It’s a good strategy to include brand storytelling in your marketing in order to convert customers. This increases customer retention when a customer feels connected to the brand.

Good luck!

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How to increase mobile conversion rate: 7 proven tips

Raksna Anand — Mon, 02 Oct 2023 15:48:22 +0000

You can define the mobile conversion rate as the number of visitors who visit the website on their mobile devices and the number of visitors who convert during these sessions.. So, it can be calculated with the below formula. A mobile conversion rate is a very important factor since most of the customers now browse products through your mobile. Mobile commerce has risen so much over the years.

People now use mobile a lot. They order food, they order groceries, and they order from Amazon. There are a million apps which have emerged in this bustling digital world.

Mobile conversion rate vs Desktop conversion rate

It is a fact that the mobile conversion rate always lags behind the desktop conversion rate.

The mobile conversion rate according to Salescycle is said to be 45% which lags behind desktop conversion which is up to 55 percent.

A survey found that most people browse through their phones but complete their transactions on desktop computers. In 2020, the mobile conversion rate reached 67%, but in 2022, it fell to 55.25%.

Do you experience this? Do you experience a drop in mobile conversion rates? Imagine 6.7 billion smartphone users regularly using their mobile to browse through products but they often abandon carts and just don’t convert at all. Imagine how much you can earn by converting those customers. Here are seven proven tips to help you convert customers through the mobile experience.

7 tips to increase mobile conversion rate

1. Optimize your site speed

Your mobile site speed plays a very important role in determining whether a customer stays and browses on your website or just leaves. Site speed can be defined as how quickly your web pages load when a particular page on your website is clicked or redirected. In a world where human attention has shortened less compared to a goldfish. Social media platforms like Instagram and Tiktok understood this behavior in humans and designed bite-sized content to keep them engaged. As an e-commerce business, it is your job to always take care of your site speed and get it optimized. Faster site speeds always support keeping the customers browsing through the website for a really long time.

And on top of that, site speed is also very important to get ranked on Google. This ensures good user experience. More like slaying two birds with one stone, of course.

Here’s how you can test your site speed

Need insights on more free tools like these? Click here

2. Optimize your site search

Users being able to navigate around your website is an important part of the conversion process. The churn rate appears to be very high if not for the search option and the navigational elements present in your website. Help your customers find products through a variety of options like breadcrumbs, menu bars, hamburger menus, filtering options, sorting options, and such.

Did you know that search contributes to at least 50% of the mobile conversion rates experienced in a website? (Contlo)

It is quite important that you include all the typo corrections in a search bar. People tend to search for particular things and if they, by mistake type a wrong spelling and if you’re able to give suggestions around what they’re looking for, then it’d be better for the conversion rate.

3. Use e-wallet payment methods

Surveys show that 53% of Americans now use digital wallets more than ever. This is a very drastic shift towards greater digitalization in the economy, according to Forbes. Enabling e-wallet payments like Apple Pay or Google Wallet allows customers to complete transactions in a single click, which is very convenient. The whole point of e-commerce being convenient is the main unique selling point behind its success. Be sure to include convenient payment methods for a better mobile conversion rate.

In fact, 19 percent of customers abandon their carts because of security concerns over giving out their payment information.

Ease this problem out for your customers.

4. On-page product recommendations

The mobile device is a very small device so that the information that you provide or the images that you place while displaying a product, is very crucial and plays a very important role. Make sure that it’s optimized for a very great mobile experience . It is vital that you provide very short and precise information that is needed and when you display on-page product recommendations. This would in turn, make it easy for the customers who are browsing to skip to similar products or related products that they are browsing for. Since the amount of content being displayed on product pages is really, really minimum, it is essential that you display social proof like customer reviews, in order to build trust and credibility among your customers.

5. Provide autofill forms

A lengthy checkout process can often overwhelm customers and lead to cart abandonment. If convenience is the key point driving mobile commerce, don’t you think auto-fill forms are the way to do so? Enable customers to automatically fill their names, addresses, contact numbers, and email address. This would be the most useful tool that can help ease conversion in a mobile website.

This feature streamlines the whole checkout process

Anatomy of a Product Page

We rely on product pages for conversion. On one hand, it is hard to design a one-size-fits-all product page, but on the other, there are key website features and functionalities that are always relevant, no matter how attribute-rich a product is, whether it has variants or plenty of configuration and customization.

A product page should always have the following information

Product name
Product description
Product attributes and specifications
Product variants
Product recommendations
Breadcrumb path
High-quality product images and video
Documentation
Wishlists
Chatbot and FAQ

Final Word

There is a rise in social commerce, voice commerce [it is the voice search people use to buy products], VR and AR replacing the traditional discovery methods. It is vital that you focus on mobile commerce and increase the conversion rates. IF you keep your mobile commerce very flexible with all these options, it is possible that you can convert a lot and convert high quality customers compared to the desktop conversion.

The post How to increase mobile conversion rate: 7 proven tips appeared first on Lateshipment.com.

How to increase conversion rates on the ecommerce store using site search?

Raksna Anand — Mon, 02 Oct 2023 13:33:11 +0000

Did you know that, Nearly 84% of e-commerce brands don’t actively optimize or measure their on-site search. (adsearch.com)

Site search is a very important feature of an e-commerce store. It helps customers find the products that they are looking for efficiently and quickly. Site search should be a feature that suits all the customers who visit the website. It leads to higher conversion rates and helps extend the longevity of the time spent on the website by an average customer.

Site search can be used to determine a number of business analytics.

Businesses can know what their customers are frequently searching for: The customers might search for products that are provided by this e-commerce store. When they find it, they are directed to that specific product page. When customers search for products that aren’t sold by the e-com store, businesses might take that chance to identify the gap in their product range and realize what customers want to see the brand sell.
Content and product optimisation: When businesses gain insights on what customers are frequently searching for, they can know which product is popular among the consumers, and optimize those product pages. Matching your customers’ search terms with the language you use is crucial for your search engine optimisation strategy.
Providing Personalized experience: Personalization is a very important aspect in e-commerce businesses right now. When shoppers search for a particular product on the search bar, personalized recommendations can be displayed, based on their previous shopping journey with the brand

Some Stats on Site Search

How to increase conversion rates on the ecommerce store using site search?

1. Make sure your search bar is visible, Duh!

We know, we know. It sounds redundant to even say it out loud! But imagine, if the site visitors have to search for the search bar, it doesn’t really make any sense. :/ Enusre that its prominent and noticeable.

Best practices for a search bar design:

Place it in a very predictable place.
Include the search icon and the word search in the search bar.
Add a camera icon on the search bar to make it easier for the customers to browse a product through the image they already have.
Choose an appropriate size.
Enable the auto correct and auto complete features.
Place your search bar on each page.
Include all the most recent searches made by the user.
Clarify what users can search for

2. Allow to search with images

As we all know, social commerce has been a very big influence on making a purchase or decision in the last few years. Influencers, people tend to adapt to the influencer lifestyle and they want to buy things that celebrities use. So they take inspiration from social media and they want to search such images on the e-commerce brand that they want to purchase from. This is where the search with images option comes in handy. If you can include such an option if possible, then it would result in a very high conversion rate. This can benefit you in the following ways:

Enhanced customer experience
Visual inspiration
Higher conversion rates
Competitive advantage
Improved product discovery

3. Allow typo corrections in your site search

Typo occurs when a customer searches for a particular term but misspells it. Let’s agree that many of us tend to type a word quickly and end up making a typo. But an e-commerce business cannot display no results for such typos. They should actually employ a number of techniques and make a typo correction. The number of techniques include a dictionary lookup, n-gram analysis, similarity keys, rule-based, probabilistic, neural-based, edit distance, etc.

Why do you need this typo correction in your site search? It is for the following reasons:

To enhance users’ search experience,
To reduce the number of bounces from the website
To save time

4. Customize your 404 page

You can expect customers to search for products that aren’t actually present in the website. In those times, the website will typically display a 404 page where it says that the particular product is not found. But don’t let that 404 page be the deadline for your website. Because the next solution people think of is to jump to your competitor’s website and look for products they want. In such a case, you can customize your 404 page to suggest a few relevant products to the search term in order to reduce the bounce rate.

5. Optimize for mobile search

There’s no doubt that mobile usage has been increasing over the years and it would be a healthy option to optimize for your mobile as well.

The less number of typing and less number of browsing leads to more number of navigation to product pages and ultimately to more number of conversions . Make sure that the filtering options conforms to the size of your mobile device.

6. Cater to customers who know what they want

Spearfish users are the users who come to a website knowing what they want, exactly what they want. These users, when they come into a website, according to a Forrester research, 43% of them search for a search bar and enter their query, and most of them come with the intention of shopping in the website. Help those your Spearfish customers, include a predictive search and autocomplete to make them search for their products easily.

7. Display product image in search

Displaying product images when a site search is done is a very helpful feature. It enhances the visual experience. It promotes cross-selling as well because the user will be exposed to a number of variety of options available on the e-commerce site. It would be better for the product identification since the image itself is displayed and it would aid in better decision making.

8. Use filters and sorting in site search

Don’t overwhelm the users with your site search result displays.

Adding the filtering and sorting feature to your search option is just one step closer to conversion. When people directly filter out options based on what they need, it’s just easy for them to navigate themselves to that particular product page.

Some best practices for these filtering and sort options are as follows.

Do not display a very big list of filtering and sorting options. Just hide them and make these options drop-down menu accessible.
Make sure that the filtering and sorting options that are selected are displayed on top of the page.
According to your users’ needs, prioritize which option you display first in the filtering and sorting options.

Final Word

As stated above, most brands do not concentrate on their site search optimization. Imagine that you type something on Google and you’re unable to find it. It’s the same case when it comes to your e-commerce business. A good site search bar is the fine line between a happy customer and a frustrated customer. Don’t let your customers leave your site with a bad experience.

Besides, site search optimization further helps you understand your target audience better. It would be a waste of time and energy and money if all the customers brought into your website through immense marketing efforts just convert less!

The post How to increase conversion rates on the ecommerce store using site search? appeared first on Lateshipment.com.